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Scoopon reached settlement with Groupon regarding domain and trademark

The battle between Scoopon and Groupon over groupon.com.au domain and related trademark seems to be over. It’s reported in SMH  that the parties reached settlement and US group buying giant got domain and TM for undisclosed compensation.

Industry experts believe that that the deal value is at least not less than $289K (the sum, which Scoopon founders brothers Hezi and Gabby Liebovich asked).

Despite of the deal groupon.com.au domain still leads nowhere at this moment. It’s be interesting to see how fast Groupon will change branding of it’s Aussie venture currently called StarDeals to Groupon.

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Crowdmass was acquired by Groupon

Next interesting deal on Aussie group buying market, after Yahoo!7 bought Spreets last year and JumpOnIt was sold to LivingSocial, last week the world-wide market leader and pioneer, US based Groupon purchased Melbourne group purchase web site CrowdMass.

If you visit Crowdmass web site you will see the message:

Crowdmass has joined the team at Stardeals by Groupon Australia (part of the fastest growing company in history).

Reportedly, as I understood from the record in the blog of the guy who knows them, Crowdmass founders – David Wei, Ying Wang and Tim Wu remain in the Groupon/Stardeals team.

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Groupon/Stardeals started to sell in Australia

Today I have passed by Stardeals.com.au web site (that is the name that Groupon has to use in Australia) and have discovered that they finally started to sell something real!

There are current deals advertised for for Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcaste and Canberra plus a National Deal. If we dig a bit deeper however, appeared that so far site is really working for Sydney only, where more than dozen past deals reported plus a bit for Melbourne (1 deal). For other the deals showed in fact are national as I see.

Regarding Sydney the progress is not bad, from past deal most popular really local deal (10-day Pass to fitness centre) was sold 776 times, first deals started from just 108 purchases.